Sent to an asylum for arguing with her husband, the vicar’s wife who set women free
In 1860 two doctors burst into Elizabeth Packard’s bedroom and carried her – literally – to the local railway station, before dumping her on the next train for Jacksonville. A crowd of townspeople had gathered to protest against the kidnap of their minister’s wife, but there was nothing they could do. According to Illinois law, the Rev Theophilus Packard was free to dispose of his ‘property’ however he wanted, and that included Elizabeth, his wife of 21 years (above right).
Within a few hours, 43-yearold Mrs Packard was under lock and key in Jacksonville Insane Asylum, where she would stay for the next three years. All it had taken was for the Reverend to declare that his wife was ‘slightly insane’.
If anyone asked Packard for evidence of Elizabeth’s insanity, he could point to the fact that she had recently started to disagree with him on religious matters which, for a man in his position, was deeply shaming. And on the topic of slavery, which was currently tearing the country in two, Mrs Packard was an abolitionist, while the Rev Packard supported the status quo. What all this boiled down to, according to the asylum’s director, Dr Andrew McFarland, was that Mrs Packard was suffering from ‘excessive application of body and mind’. Basically, she was too clever by half.
For the next three years, Elizabeth fought to secure her release and to make sure no other married woman ever had to endure the same thing. After numerous cruel setbacks, Elizabeth got her freedom and started an ambitious campaign to reform America’s entire judicial system. Thanks to her, married women could no longer be put in an asylum on the say-so of their husbands.
Next, she turned her attention to married women’s rights, managing to get the law changed in several states so that a wife now had equal access to both her children and her property. She also kept up an energetic writing schedule and made enough money to buy a house in Chicago, where she could live with her six children. She even supported her by now impoverished husband. It is a thrilling story, and Kate Moore tells it using language that borders at times on the melodramatic. Slightly worrying, too, is the way she glosses over details that are inconvenient to her heroine’s story. What are we to make of the fact that Elizabeth had been in the asylum as a teenager? And why did she write a love letter to married Dr McFarland, a man whom she later pursued through the courts? These aren’t dealbreakers, but one is left feeling that Elizabeth Packard was a more complex woman than the one who emerges here.